Tech Lead Cloud DevOps Engineer Global - DevOps Tooling & Pipelines

About Us

At Southwest Airlines, we believe that flying should feel like freedom. For over 50 years, we’ve been connecting people to what matters most with low fares, legendary hospitality, and a heart for service. Our culture is built on the principles of fun, friendliness, and family, making us one of the most admired workplaces in the world. 

If you’re passionate about making a difference, love working in a fast-paced environment, and want to help millions of travelers reach their destinations with a smile, Southwest Airlines is the place for you. Here,  your career can truly take flight. 

Job Summary

• Southwest’s DevOps Tooling & Pipelines Pod designs and operates the enterprise platforms that power code quality, artifact management, container registries, and secure software delivery. The team owns mission-critical capabilities such as Nexus Repository, SonarQube, and Amazon ECR while building cloud-native automation, reusable platform patterns, and developer self-service at enterprise scale.

• As Tech Lead Cloud DevOps Engineer, you’ll set technical direction and mentor engineers building the next generation of secure software delivery. You’ll lead architecture and engineering across CI/CD, AWS, Docker and Kubernetes or ECS, and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or CloudFormation. You’ll drive automated quality gates, software supply chain controls, vulnerability-management capabilities, high availability, disaster recovery, observability, and performance optimization—creating reusable solutions that enable engineers rather than one-off implementations.

• A technical lead for a team focused on designing and building enterprise cloud infrastructure automation, pipeline, CI/CD patterns and cloud capabilities for AWS. Focus on overall product implementation with responsibilities that include providing technical guidance for team members, ensuring cost-effectiveness, quality of solution, design, and implementation.

• Work with other leaders to shape, improve and evolve the cloud platform vision and strategy for the future of cloud infrastructure and help manage the adoption process
• Operate in a DevOps culture and team, responsible for architecture, design, development, implementation, and ongoing operations of new and emerging technology platforms
• Evaluate cloud services and architecture to identify strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions, or approaches to problems
• Implement automation tools and frameworks for automatic code deployment (CI/CD)
• Work with the development team to deploy and manage tools that support SDLC automation, configuration management, and release management
• Create state-of-the-art technical architectures with automation to support complex delivery across a wide range of digital and enterprise applications
• Consult with stakeholders to specify requirements and solutions which address business challenges and opportunities
• Serve as a subject matter expert in cloud infrastructure, performing design reviews and consulting with internal teams to ensure design best practices
• Participate in system and acceptance testing to ensure that systems are functionally appropriate, technically sound, and well-integrated
• Lead, define and clearly communicate technical standards, governance, and compliance for cloud ecosystem
• May perform other job duties as directed by Employee's Leaders

• Knowledge of AWS Infrastructure as a Service Automation tools like Cloud Formation
• Knowledge of AWS compute, data sources, security technologies
• Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code (IAC)
• Skilled in deployment strategies using Docker for containerization
• Knowledge of the monitoring and management of the build and deployment processes and infrastructure
• Ability to analyze services to ensure security best practices are followed
• Ability to mentor and guide team members' learning, including introducing new ideas and technologies
• Skilled in evaluating, onboarding, and managing new technologies/services/features
• Ability to anticipate business needs and lead a team towards identifying and solving cross-domain problems

• Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field and/or equivalent formal training

• Required: Expert-level experience, expansive and far-reaching knowledge in Cloud software or DevOps
• 8-10 years of relevant work-related experience
• GitLab pipelines or equivalent
• AWS; Docker; Kubernetes; ECS; Terraform; CloudFormation

• Preferred:

  • SonarQube

  • Nexus Repository

  • JFrog Artifactory

  • Amazon ECR; SBOM; OSSM

  • Software supply chain security

• Must meet confidentiality expectations as to confidential, proprietary and sensitive Company information
• Ability to work extended hours as needed